Author: John Drymon

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

Many of you know (and I mentioned in a sermon a few weeks ago) that my favorite piece of Christmas pop culture ephemera is the 1965 CBS special A Charlie Brown Christmas. My wife, quoting something she had read on Twitter, put this peculiar preference into perspective for me this year: “A Charlie Brown Christmas takes the tried and true formula that every child just loves… melancholy plus experimental jazz.” I can take or leave experimental jazz (I don’t think I’m musically refined enough to fully appreciate it, to be honest) but melancholy–now, that’s my jam!

Joking aside, I think this brings up an important point not just about the Feast of the Nativity and the miracle of the Incarnation, but also about the shape of the Christian life in response to the truth of this night. It points to a reality about the human condition–namely, the existence of sadness and darkness and grief, all results of the Fall–in the light of our reasonable and holy hope. And I think it encourages us to take a bit more care in how we talk about that reality, making a distinction between emotional states (which are neither normative nor constitutive of one’s soul) and spiritual qualities which are.

Now that’s all a bit dense, so let me begin unpacking it by calling upon the lazy preacher’s favorite tactic: when in doubt, denounce something. This will be a gentle denunciation, though, (more a quibble than a trumpet blast) because it’s about something which arises from a good intention, but which I think fundamentally misses the mark. I don’t know if this is still “a thing”, but there was a fad some years ago among churches to have something they called a “Blue Christmas” service, usually some days before the feast itself, often on the Winter Solstice–the darkest day of the year. It was intended specifically for people for whom Christmas is a difficult time of year due to some loss or struggle or dysfunction. I’m sure such services were meant to normalize or de-stigmatize difficult emotions around the holidays, presumably whether it be the mild melancholy of A Charlie Brown Christmas or real, debilitating depression or anything in-between. I get that; it seems to come from a place of care and concern and love.

That said, I cannot imagine any amount of contextualization, any number of disclaimers, neither the subtlest preaching nor the canniest liturgical craftsmanship which would sending the unintentional message to many that “real Christmas” is for jolly people and “Blue Christmas” is set aside for the presumably cheerless, who are “thrown a bone” on some other, convenient occasion. Again, I’m sure this is not the intention, and perhaps my profound discomfort with liturgical innovation makes me more sensitive than most, but my “gut reaction” to this sort of thing is that it can be counter-productive.

The truth is, there are doubtless some here tonight who are having the holly-jolliest of Christmases and there are some here tonight who are having the most difficult Christmas of their lives due to some pain or loss, and there are a whole heck of a lot of us somewhere in between. And it is good for us to be in this place together tonight. That is because God’s promise to us is not jollity but joy, not mere cheerfulness but lasting happiness which abides even in seasons of great distress. Because Christ being born in Bethlehem and in our hearts doesn’t mean we’ll be spared trouble or even trauma in this life; rather, it means that amidst all the changes and chances of this life, Christ’s abiding presence can give us a deeper peace. What’s more, being a part of a community where we share in each others’ joys and sorrows means we can all hold each other up, with God’s help, through all those exigencies.

Toxic positivity, the suggestion that one must always be blithesome and pleasant, has no place in the faith of the bible or of any humane worldview. God chose–and this is what tonight is all about–to enter human history in all its messiness and difficulty and sorrow. Can you imagine the scene that night in Bethlehem? Yes, it is a joyful scene, but it is not a particularly mirthful one. The Holy Family are not in the comfort of their home, but in a place meant for livestock. The shepherds don’t break out the champagne when they get there. Our Lady’s response is pensive and prayerful. We might say that the first Christmas was happy, in the truest sense of that word, but it wasn’t merry. (One thing I always loved about her late majesty’s Christmas speeches was her insistence on wishing her subjects a “Happy Christmas” rather than a “Merry Christmas”, I think for precisely this reason.)

And how appropriate is this for the one who would go on to live a life both wondrous and sorrowful? Those with us again tomorrow at 10 a.m. will have the opportunity to sing those wonderful words from a hymn which is a classic but sadly didn’t quite “make the cut” for Christmas Eve “Once in Royal David’s City”: “For he feeleth for our sadness, and he shareth in our gladness.” We have a God who chose to share with us this whole beautiful, tragic, sometimes sweet, sometimes horrific experience of life in a fallen world in order to redeem the same.

So, the truth of the Incarnation doesn’t mean that every day will be sunshine and lollipops and trips to the zoo. The one who took up his cross and bid us follow didn’t promise that. It is, however, the only way to true and lasting joy in this life, that peace which passes understanding, and to eternal bliss in the next. So, whether your heart is heavy or light tonight, whether you’re feeling it or not, whether this is for you the best Christmas ever or the worst, God stands ready to give you his Grace. Christ, the Word of God through whom you were created, provides his very Body and Blood in the Sacrament to keep you in everlasting life. The same Spirit who spoke by the prophets bids you come to be comforted. The one God who came as perfect man to redeem humanity has made you whole. Our faith is built on nothing less than this, and even the gates of hell shall not prevail against us.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

We encounter Mary’s betrothed, Joseph, in today’s reading, and he’s a figure we don’t hear much about in the Gospels. In Luke’s Gospel, Joseph shows up, but does little but follow Mary and Jesus around. In Matthew’s Gospel, by contrast, Joseph is shown taking the initiative in taking his family to Egypt on the eve of King Herod’s execution of the Holy Innocents and, of course, he is presented in today’s Gospel being faced with what is to all appearances a rather sticky situation.

We learn first of all that Joseph is betrothed to Mary when the events in today’s Gospel lesson take place. Some modern translations use the word “engaged” to describe the relationship, and the Authorized Version which we are using during this season uses the term “espoused,” but neither rendering is entirely clear. The Greek word Matthew uses is meinsteutheiseis, which suggests an intermediate stage between engagement and marriage, namely betrothal, a relationship status which we tend not to have in the modern West. At this stage the legal arrangements surrounding the marriage would have been organized by the couple and their families. Vows would have already been exchanged and contracts already signed.

This “ups the ante”, as it were, for Joseph; and lest we think his initial impulse to “put her away privily” (that is, to end the relationship without making a big deal of it) would have been a selfish act on Joseph’s part, the Gospel tells us that this plan was motivated by Joseph’s righteousness and his desire to protect his intended from public disgrace. What our translation renders as “put away privily,” and what more recent translations render as “dismiss quietly,” is literally, in the Greek, to “divorce secretly”- something quite different. Technically, should Mary have been found guilty of infidelity, the Jewish Law would have actually permitted execution–even if that were highly unlikely by the First Century A.D.–and it certainly would have led to the Blessed Virgin being subject to public scorn and both social and financial ruin both for her and her family.

Instead of turning Mary over to trial, though, Joseph intended to discreetly divorce her, which would have shielded her from public scorn but would likely have led to some significant financial burden for him, just like modern divorces can be expensive. So, Joseph acts here in a more selfless manner than the Law would have demanded and so we might even modify Matthew’s positive description of Joseph. Simply following the Law would have made Joseph a “just [or righteous] man” by the standards of his era; to decide on a course of action, above-and-beyond the demands of the law makes him a Saint.

It is after this act of selflessness that the Lord demands even more from Joseph. We all know how the story goes. An angel appears and explains to Joseph that the Virgin had not been unfaithful, but that she had conceived a Son by the Holy Ghost, a Son who would bear the sins of the world and save humanity. Joseph was ordered to take Mary as his wife and to be our Lord’s earthly father. Now Joseph knew that his wife had not been unfaithful; rather she had been reckoned as highly favored of God. This, however, diminishes neither the difficulty of God’s mandate to Joseph nor the great faithfulness Joseph displayed in following it. Joseph knew that his wife was a virgin, but the world would not have known. We do not know how Joseph was seen by his friends and neighbors and business associates. The Gospel is silent on this issue. Even so, we know that Joseph ran the risk of being seen as engaging in serious impropriety by going through with the marriage.

That brings me (at last!) to the point of this sermon, which is really quite simple, but it may be counterintuitive: sometimes God’s mission is offensive to societal norms of propriety and sometimes, as Christians, we are called to act in apparently scandalous ways in service to the Gospel. Now, let me confess that I am more guilty than most when it comes to making an idol out of norms of propriety, so I say this with some reticence. Also, I am not suggesting that society’s rules of propriety are “meant to be broken”. Rather, sometimes we can see where these rules hinder us from the work of the Gospel. For Joseph, God’s will was made quite clear and he knew he had to “break the rules,” so to speak. For the prophet Isaiah, as well, God was quite clear in demanding that he be very impolite indeed by walking around naked for three years. That, by the way, is one of those bible stories I would have loved to have heard as a child, but we never covered it in Sunday School for some reason.

Anyway, these are both rather grandiose examples of the point, but we can think of some which are more likely to come into our immediate spheres of influence. For example, I grew up being told that it was horribly impolite to talk about religion pretty much anywhere outside the walls of the church. But is this in keeping with the Gospel’s mandate to share our Good News with all people? Propriety demands that we not consort with dissolute, licentious people; but Jesus hung around with outcasts and sinners. Propriety demands that we try so hard to be nonjudgmental that we stay silent for fear of offending our brother or sister; but sometimes the Gospel demands that we speak the truth, in love, when we believe they have gone astray.

All of this is to say that sometimes obedience to God’s Will will be unpopular or impolite. Sometimes it may even be scandalous. We may take heart, however, that it was thanks to one man’s obedience, in spite of societal expectations, that our Lord and his blessed mother were given a home, and that the scripture might be fulfilled: Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall call him Emmanuel.”

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

“Art thou he who should come, or do we look for another?” It’s an odd question for John the Baptist to ask, considering that he got his answer eight chapters earlier. At the Jordan River the heavens had opened and the very voice of God confirmed Jesus’ identity: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased.” John knew that he was unworthy to Baptize the Lord to whom he had been pointing, and had consented only because of the authority of the one who demanded it. So, John the Baptist had seemed to figure out that it was Jesus himself for whom he was the forerunner, so why this question about Jesus’ role in the story so much later? If in the third chapter of Matthew, John seems convinced that Jesus is none other than the Messiah, why would he begin to question this by the eleventh chapter?

It seems to me that the question on John’s lips might not be as strange as it first seems, and this is because of the shape which his expectations must have taken. John’s understanding of the Messiah’s mission would likely have been the same as his contemporaries’- namely, that the Messiah would come and free God’s people, the Jews, from captivity to an oppressive foreign regime. And now John finds himself quite literally a captive, a prisoner, after the one whom he believed to be the Messiah had already come. Things were supposed to get much better with the advent of the Messiah, but for John and for the others who followed him, things seemed to have gotten much, much worse. We can imagine the tone with which John’s question was asked. He must have been more than a little frustrated. “Are you the Messiah or not?!”

Now two-thousand years later, we know how this ended. The Kingdom which Christ had ushered in was not of the sort expected. It was not a free Israel with a reëstablished monarchy, a renewed corporate worship life centered at the temple, and a Roman Army on the run. For as long as the Jews had their own leaders these leaders would remain Roman puppets, the temple would be utterly destroyed a few decades later, and the Roman Army wouldn’t go anywhere for a very long time. We know that the Kingdom Christ would establish was different from the Kingdom his contemporary compatriots expected- that it would be a Kingdom not of this world, a Kingdom whose citizens were determined not by lineage but by Baptism, whose King could not be seen in some royal court in Jerusalem, but in his marvelous, miraculous appearing wherever Christians are gathered together around his throne, which is the altar. We know that now, but would we have expected it if we were John the Baptist or some other first century Jew who’d been thrown in prison for disturbing the peace? Not likely.

So, John’s apparent lack of faith is understandable. If somebody told us he were here to free us from oppression and we ended up in prison instead, we’d naturally wonder if the one who made that promise really intended to be our Savior after all. We, like John, might become exasperated and ask, “Well, are you the Messiah, or aren’t you?”

That we would probably be in the same boat as John means that the message we get from his qualms is not that we’re a whole lot smarter or more faithful than those first century Jews whose expectations were misdirected. If anything, I think it should simultaneously convict us of our own misdirected expectations and serve as a consolation for the same. If a great hero of the faith like John the Baptist could get snippy when things didn’t seem to go according to his plan, then maybe we’re not so bad after all. On the other hand, we should be even more reticent to expect God to conform to our expectations, knowing how easy it is to fall into that trap.

What an appropriate lesson to learn this time of year! Our Lord’s arrival both in Bethlehem and on the last day both convict and comfort. Our shepherd wields both rod and staff; he demands repentance and graciously offers the joy of redemption. We live in an either/or kind of world, but often the truth of our faith is a both/and kind of reality. We are called to things unseen, which can be frightening, but we are encouraged by Christ’s promise to be with us always. We are called to repentance, but even in penitence there is joy. Even in what seems the longest darkness, you can see the light begin to dawn.

Ultimately, Advent is about deferred expectations- the hope of something we don’t fully understand at a time which we do not choose. It is about this both/and reality or penitence and joyful expectation. Just like John might have expected political salvation in his own lifetime rather than spiritual salvation delayed, so have the hopes of the Church and its children often been misplaced, expecting God to conform to our designs rather than the other way round.

Advent is at least in part about this process of setting aside our own expectations of how God ought to operate and subjugating those expectations to the promise of Christ’s reign as it is now and as it will be in the age to come. It is about waiting for those four last things I mentioned the last two weeks—death, judgment, heaven and hell—knowing that for those who are faithful, God’s plan in God’s time will be more glorious than anything we could possibly expect.

So, when we ask, along with John the Baptist, “Art thou he who should come, or do we look for another?” we may be sure that the answer is “yes” even if our doubt militates against our reasons to believe. Our doubt is natural, but it will be answered to our satisfaction and, indeed, be more satisfying than we, in our impatience, can foresee.

+In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.